Episode 705: The Anniversary Emails Edition
Date July 17, 2015 Summary On the podcast’s third anniversary, Ben and Sam answer emails about how much baseball players work, whatever happened to offensive shortstops, breaking unwritten rules, projecting prospects, and more, then place an impromptu call. Topics * Episode 704 follow-up: Ned Colletti emotion * Episode 702 follow-up: Manager vs. GM battles * MLB player workload * Decline of offensive shortstops * Breaking unwritten rules * Worst seasons by a Hall of Famer * Improvements in projecting prospects * Episode 701 follow-up: Daylight play cold-call Intro Golden Dogs, "Anniversary Waltz" Banter July 18th is the third anniversary of Effectively Wild and Sam's birthday. Email Questions * Chris: "Some people like to complain about how much MLB players get paid despite having a five month offseason, thereby implying that they don't work that much. However when considering that during the season they work 6-7 days a week with no vacation and I'd imagine that even before considering flights between cities they're at the park for more than 8 hours on gamedays. Furthermore, they're expected to work out in the offseason to get in the best shape of their life, rebuild their swing, learn a new pitch, etc. My question is this: how much does the average ballplayer work over the course of an entire year when accounting for the season and offseason?" * Kevin: "In talking about All-Star voting this year many people have commented on how weak the field is for shortstops, especially in the AL. This has led to hand wringing about the decline of the shortstop from the era of the big three. The question is, why? Why has shortstop declined as an offensive position? My hastily formed hypothesis is as follows: as our understanding of defensive performance and evaluation has advanced, fewer organizations are content putting big bat mediocre glove guys at shortstop. These guys are being moved elsewhere. In the previous generation when defense was being undervalued by many teams were more likely to put up with below average to average defense in exchange for offense up the middle." * Marcus: "What if I were managing a team and instructed my players to break every unwritten rule at every opportunity. Would this strategy significantly affect team OBP? How long would it take for opposing teams to eventually disregard unwritten rules when playing against my team? What would those games without unwritten rules look like?" * Jason: "Ken Davidoff did a feature in the NY Post about the great Yankees flameout Ruben Rivera. At the end of the piece Davidoff had a quote from Brian Cashman that I found intriguing. 'But I guarantee, if you plop him into today’s analytic world and you dissect that player, and you can go back in time with all of today’s stuff, there would’ve been predicted failure. I guarantee it. Instead of people being shocked that he flamed out — ‘How did this happen? He was the next Mickey Mantle!’ — in today’s world, that player wouldn’t be packaged as the next Mickey Mantle. That player would be packaged as a lot of swing and miss. Feasting on garbage pitching at the lower levels. And he would’ve had predictable trouble at the higher levels. I don’t think there’s going to be misses on players like that, because the league as a whole has higher ground.' It made me wonder, do you think there's any truth to that? Anyway, how would we even measure this? How many prospects with big numbers in the minors are heralded and then miss. And how could we measure whether that number has gone down in the analytics era?" * Devin: "Daylight play: call me if you want an explanation." Play Index * Sam uses the Play Index to find out what the worst year a Hall of Famer could have. * In 2007 Craig Biggio had -2.1 WAR. Notes * Other episodes from July 18th are Episode 1, Episode 246, and Episode 495. * Ned Colletti's son worked as a scouts for the Giants, which may explain why he was so emotional about them winning the World Series. * Sam thinks that if Derek Jeter came up today he would be a center fielder, not a shortstop. * Ben and Sam note that while a team that always breaks unwritten rules would have more intentional HBP, the opposing teams could choose to hit players in low leverage situations. * Since Ryan Howard's debut season, Chase Utley has never had a season with a lower WAR than Ryan Howard, but has also never finished higher in MVP voting than Ryan Howard. * Ben and Sam cold-call Devin about the daylight play, but Sam thinks what Devin is explaining is actually the 'wheel' play. * Sam, on why they called Devin, "We were curious what you were gonna do" Links * Effectively Wild Episode 705: The Anniversary Emails Edition * The 'glove-stealing' flamout -and Mexican revival - of yanks' next 'Mantle' by Ken Davidoff Category:Episodes Category:Guest Episodes Category:Email Episodes